Hot spring and life sciences.

Math 239 : Discrete Mathematics for the Life Sciences Spring 2008

Hot Spring Metagenomics

Hot springs have been investigated since the XIX century, but isolation and examination of their thermophilic microbial inhabitants did not start until the 1950s. Many thermophilic microorganisms and their viruses have since been discovered, although the real complexity of thermal communities was envisaged when research based on PCR amplification of the 16S rRNA genes arose. Thereafter, the pos...

[life SCIENCES]

F unctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a noninvasive, powerful tool that has been utilized in both research and clinical arenas since the early 1990s [1] and has provided valuable insights to the understanding of the human brain function. fMRI has enabled researchers to directly study the temporal and spatial changes in the brain as a function of various stimuli. Because it relies on ...

Hot nuclei at the Cold Spring

Biologists are used to the idea that structure and function are interconnected; they can relate the gross anatomy of a limb to locomotion, the organization of a mitochondrion to energy production, and the geometry of an enzyme to a catalytic activity. Therefore, they would expect textbooks and conferences on the nucleus to relate the vital functions like replication and transcription to the und...

Virus silicification under simulated hot spring conditions.

Silicification of organisms in silica-depositing environments can impact both their ecology and their presence in the fossil record. Although microbes have been silicified under laboratory and environmental conditions, viruses have not. Bacteriophage T4 was successfully silicified under laboratory conditions that closely simulated those found in silica-depositing hot springs. Virus morphology w...